Hundreds of employees at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will be affected by budget constraints looming over the space agency for the current year, with Congress still behind on issuing the final budget for 2024 and its final decision regarding Mars Sample Return (MSR).
In a statement issued on Tuesday, JPL announced that it will layoff 530 employees, or around 8% of the JPL workforce, as well as 40 contractors, in its latest effort to reduce spending.
The decision has been months in the making as the space agency fears federal budget cuts to its overall spending for the year ahead. In January, JPL issued a hiring freeze and laid off 100 contractors as it braced itself for the new budget. At the same time, NASA paused work on the Mars Sample Return’s Capture, Containment and Return System, an essential aspect of the MSR program, anticipating that its ambitious mission will receive less than one-third of the requested funding.
“While we still do not have an FY24 appropriation or the final word from Congress on our Mars Sample Return (MSR) budget allocation, we are now in a position where we must take further significant action to reduce our spending,” JPL Director Laurie Leshin wrote in a memo to JPL employees.
In March, NASA requested $27.2 billion for its 2024 budget, a 7% increase from 2023. A few months later, however, a deficit reduction legislation went into effect, posing a threat to the space agency’s budget request. On top of that, NASA had come under heavy scrutiny for having unrealistic cost and timeline expectations for MSR.
NASA had requested $949.3 million for MSR in its budget proposal for 2024, but it will likely receive $300 million. That’s 36% of the $822-million budget the mission received in 2023, a sign that the Senate Appropriations subcommittee responsible for overseeing NASA’s budget is clamping down on the space agency’s overly ambitious goals of launching a lander and orbiter to Mars in 2028.
In its proposed 2024 budget for NASA, the Senate Appropriations subcommittee directed the space agency to submit a year-by-year funding profile for MSR within the $5.3 billion lifecycle cost outlined in the 2022 planetary science Decadal Survey. If NASA is unable to do so, it could face mission cancellation, the subcommittee wrote in a report issued in July.
Although we’re well into 2024, NASA has yet to receive a final budget for the year, and there has been no final decision made by Congress regarding MSR. The space agency, however, fears that it’ll be bad news and is therefore doing what it can now to reduce its spending as it awaits final word.
NASA has already made some cuts to its original budget request for 2024, namely suspending work on the Geospace Dynamics Constellation, a group of satellites designed to study Earth’s upper atmosphere. Other missions have also suffered as a result of budgeting concerns at JPL, such as NASA’s VERITAS mission to Venus, which was delayed indefinitely.
“So in the absence of an appropriation, and as much as we wish we didn’t need to take this action, we must now move forward to protect against even deeper cuts later were we to wait,” Leshin wrote in the employee memo.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that NASA initiated the layoffs, when in fact is was JPL announcing the layoffs. As a federally funded research and development center, JPL is managed by Caltech, and its employees work for Caltech. While JPL is a part of Caltech, its primary purpose and activities are centered around various space missions for NASA.
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